Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

I HATE seeing the films from 1920,of perfectly good canning jars being smashed because they had moonshine in them! Such a waste! I'm glad to see that at least some of them were saved to use for putting up fruit!

Can't help wonder exactly how a couple of boxes of, err, jock straps ended up on the shelf. Where they the Feds, or the Bootleggers? Whatever, these were the best kind, apparently. "Perfect in every way." And most important, lacking all those "pernicious patent attachments."

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.